“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” - George W. Bush

Friday, December 27, 2013

Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe that a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to keep in check. Classification rules erected walls to prevent public debate.

This article from The Washington Post is masterful. It lays waste to the arguments by the liars and defenders of the vicious assault by a rogue federal agency, a house of Un-American activities, called the NSA, against the rights and freedoms of American citizens. It is rich in details and easy to understand.

Edward Joseph Snowden emerged at the appointed hour, alone, blending into a light crowd of locals and tourists. He cocked his arm for a handshake, then turned his shoulder to indicate a path. Before long he had guided his visitor to a secure space out of public view.

During more than 14 hours of interviews, the first he has conducted in person since arriving here in June, Snowden did not part the curtains or step outside. Russia granted him temporary asylum on Aug. 1, but Snowden remains a target of surpassing interest to the intelligence services whose secrets he spilled on an epic scale.

Late this spring, Snowden supplied three journalists, including this one, with caches of top-secret documents from the National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor. Dozens of revelations followed, and then hundreds, as news organizations around the world picked up the story. Congress pressed for explanations, new evidence revived old lawsuits and the Obama administration was obliged to declassify thousands of pages it had fought for years to conceal.

Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations. One of the leaked presentation slides described the agency’s “collection philosophy” as “Order one of everything off the menu.”

Six months after the first revelations appeared in The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Snowden agreed to reflect at length on the roots and repercussions of his choice. He was relaxed and animated over two days of nearly unbroken conversation, fueled by burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian pastry.

Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence career and from his recent life as “an indoor cat” in Russia. But he consistently steered the conversation back to surveillance, democracy and the meaning of the documents he exposed.

“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”

‘Going in blind’

Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe that a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to keep in check. Classification rules erected walls to prevent public debate.

Toppling those walls would be a spectacular act of transgression against the norms that prevailed inside them. Someone would have to bypass security, extract the secrets, make undetected contact with journalists and provide them with enough proof to tell the stories.

The NSA’s business is “information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the agency on its own turf.

“You recognize that you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging that he had no way to know whether the public would share his views.

“But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try something rather than do nothing.”

By his own terms, Snowden succeeded beyond plausible ambition. The NSA, accustomed to watching without being watched, faces scrutiny it has not endured since the 1970s, or perhaps ever.

The cascading effects have made themselves felt in Congress, the courts, popular culture, Silicon Valley and world capitals. The basic structure of the Internet itself is now in question, as Brazil and members of the European Union consider measures to keep their data away from U.S. territory and U.S. technology giants including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo take extraordinary steps to block the collection of data by their government.

For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden’s motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.

On Dec. 16, in a lawsuit that could not have gone forward without the disclosures made possible by Snowden, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon described the NSA’s capabilities as “almost Orwellian” and said its bulk collection of U.S. domestic telephone records was probably unconstitutional.

The next day, in the Roosevelt Room, an unusual delegation of executives from old telephone companies and young Internet firms told President Obama that the NSA’s intrusion into their networks was a threat to the U.S. information economy. The following day, an advisory panel appointed by Obama recommended substantial new restrictions on the NSA, including an end to the domestic call-records program.

“This week is a turning point,” said the Government Accountability Project’s Jesselyn Radack, who is one of Snowden’s legal advisers. “It has been just a cascade.”

‘They elected me’

On June 22, the Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint charging Snowden with espionage and felony theft of government property. It was a dry enumeration of statutes, without a trace of the anger pulsing through Snowden’s former precincts.

In the intelligence and national security establishments, Snowden is widely viewed as a reckless saboteur, and journalists abetting him little less so.

At the Aspen Security Forum in July, a four-star military officer known for his even keel seethed through one meeting alongside a reporter he knew to be in contact with Snowden. Before walking away, he turned and pointed a finger.

“We didn’t have another 9/11,” he said angrily, because intelligence enabled warfighters to find the enemy first. “Until you’ve got to pull the trigger, until you’ve had to bury your people, you don’t have a clue.”

It is commonly said of Snowden that he broke an oath of secrecy, a turn of phrase that captures a sense of betrayal. NSA Director Keith B. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., among many others, have used that formula.

In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the ­classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.

“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”

People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his purpose.

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

What entitled Snowden, now 30, to take on that responsibility?

“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”

He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

“It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual — that I’m uniquely qualified, an angel descending from the heavens — as that they put it on someone, somewhere,” he said. “You have the capability, and you realize every other [person] sitting around the table has the same capability but they don’t do it. So somebody has to be the first.”

‘Front-page test’

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people — deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and “incidentally,” when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.

But Snowden also said acceptance of the agency’s operations was not universal. He began to test that proposition more than a year ago, he said, in periodic conversations with co-workers and superiors that foreshadowed his emerging plan.

Beginning in October 2012, he said, he brought his misgivings to two superiors in the NSA’s Technology Directorate and two more in the NSA Threat Operations Center’s regional base in Hawaii. For each of them, and 15 other co-workers, Snowden said he opened a data query tool called BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which used color-coded “heat maps” to depict the volume of data ingested by NSA taps.

His colleagues were often “astonished to learn we are collecting more in the United States on Americans than we are on Russians in Russia,” he said. Many of them were troubled, he said, and several said they did not want to know any more.

“I asked these people, ‘What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?’ ” he said. He noted that critics have accused him of bypassing internal channels of dissent. “How is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?” he said.

By last December, Snowden was contacting reporters, although he had not yet passed along any classified information. He continued to give his colleagues the “front-page test,” he said, until April.

Asked about those conversations, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines sent a prepared statement to The Post: “After extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.”

Snowden recounted another set of conversations that he said took place three years earlier, when he was sent by the NSA’s Technology Directorate to support operations at a listening post in Japan. As a system administrator, he had full access to security and auditing controls. He said he saw serious flaws with information security.

“I actually recommended they move to two-man control for administrative access back in 2009,” he said, first to his supervisor in Japan and then to the directorate’s chief of operations in the Pacific. “Sure, a whistleblower could use these things, but so could a spy.”

That precaution, which requires a second set of credentials to perform risky operations such as copying files onto a removable drive, has been among the principal security responses to the Snowden affair.

Vines, the NSA spokeswoman, said there was no record of those conversations, either.

U.S. ‘would cease to exist’

Just before releasing the documents this spring, Snowden made a final review of the risks. He had overcome what he described at the time as a “selfish fear” of the consequences for himself.

“I said to you the only fear [left] is apathy — that people won’t care, that they won’t want change,” he recalled this month.

The documents leaked by Snowden compelled attention because they revealed to Americans a history they did not know they had.

Internal briefing documents reveled in the “Golden Age of Electronic Surveillance.” Brawny cover names such as MUSCULAR, TUMULT and TURMOIL boasted of the agency’s prowess.

With assistance from private communications firms, the NSA had learned to capture enormous flows of data at the speed of light from fiber-optic cables that carried Internet and telephone traffic over continents and under seas. According to one document in Snowden’s cache, the agency’s Special Source Operations group, which as early as 2006 was said to be ingesting “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds,” had an official seal that might have been parody: an eagle with all the world’s cables in its grasp.

Most of that data, by definition and intent, belonged to ordinary people suspected of nothing. But vast new storage capacity and processing tools enabled the NSA to use the information to map human relationships on a planetary scale. Only this way, its leadership believed, could the NSA reach beyond its universe of known intelligence targets.

In the view of the NSA, signals intelligence, or electronic eavesdropping, was a matter of life and death, “without which America would cease to exist as we know it,” according to an internal presentation in the first week of October 2001 as the agency ramped up its response to the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

With stakes such as those, there was no capability the NSA believed it should leave on the table. The agency followed orders from President George W. Bush to begin domestic collection without authority from Congress and the courts. When the NSA won those authorities later, some of them under secret interpretations of laws passed by Congress between 2007 and 2012, the Obama administration went further still.

Using PRISM, the cover name for collection of user data from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and five other U.S.-based companies, the NSA could obtain all communications to or from any specified target. The companies had no choice but to comply with the government's request for data.

But the NSA could not use PRISM, which was overseen once a year by the surveillance court, for the collection of virtually all data handled by those companies. To widen its access, it teamed up with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, to break into the private fiber-optic links that connected Google and Yahoo data centers around the world.

That operation, which used the cover name MUSCULAR, tapped into U.S. company data from outside U.S. territory. The NSA, therefore, believed it did not need permission from Congress or judicial oversight. Data from hundreds of millions of U.S. accounts flowed over those Google and Yahoo links, but classified rules allowed the NSA to presume that data ingested overseas belonged to foreigners.

‘Persistent threat’

Disclosure of the MUSCULAR project enraged and galvanized U.S. technology executives. They believed the NSA had lawful access to their front doors — and had broken down the back doors anyway.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith took to his company’s blog and called the NSA an “advanced persistent threat” — the worst of all fighting words in U.S. cybersecurity circles, generally reserved for Chinese state-sponsored hackers and sophisticated criminal enterprises.

“For the industry as a whole, it caused everyone to ask whether we knew as much as we thought,” Smith recalled in an interview. “It underscored the fact that while people were confident that the U.S. government was complying with U.S. laws for activity within U.S. territory, perhaps there were things going on outside the United States . . . that made this bigger and more complicated and more disconcerting than we knew.”

They wondered, he said, whether the NSA was “collecting proprietary information from the companies themselves.”

Led by Google and then Yahoo, one company after another announced expensive plans to encrypt its data traffic over tens of thousands of miles of cable. It was a direct — in some cases, explicit — blow to NSA collection of user data in bulk. If the NSA wanted the information, it would have to request it or circumvent the encryption one target at a time.

As these projects are completed, the Internet will become a less friendly place for the NSA to work. The agency can still collect data from virtually anyone, but collecting from everyone will be harder.

The industry’s response, Smith acknowledged, was driven by a business threat. U.S. companies could not afford to be seen as candy stores for U.S. intelligence. But the principle of the thing, Smith said, “is fundamentally about ensuring that customer data is turned over to governments pursuant to valid legal orders and in accordance with constitutional principles.”

‘Warheads on foreheads’

Snowden has focused on much the same point from the beginning: Individual targeting would cure most of what he believes is wrong with the NSA.

Six months ago, a reporter asked him by encrypted e-mail why Americans would want the NSA to give up bulk data collection if that would limit a useful intelligence tool.

“I believe the cost of frank public debate about the powers of our government is less than the danger posed by allowing these powers to continue growing in secret,” he replied, calling them “a direct threat to democratic governance.”

In the Moscow interview, Snowden said, “What the government wants is something they never had before,” adding: “They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?”

Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”

“The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he said.

Technology, of course, has enabled a great deal of consumer surveillance by private companies, as well. The difference with the NSA’s possession of the data, Snowden said, is that government has the power to take away life or freedom.

At the NSA, he said, “there are people in the office who joke about, ‘We put warheads on foreheads.’ Twitter doesn’t put warheads on foreheads.”

Privacy, as Snowden sees it, is a universal right, applicable to American and foreign surveillance alike.

“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”

‘Everybody knows’

On June 29, Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counter­terrorism coordinator, awoke to a report in Der Spiegel that U.S. intelligence had broken into E.U. offices, including his, to implant surveillance devices.

The 56-year-old Belgian, whose work is often classified, did not consider himself naive. But he took the news personally, and more so when he heard unofficial explanations from Washington.

“ ‘Everybody knows. Everybody does’ — Keith Alexander said that,” de Kerchove said in an interview. “I don’t like the idea that the NSA will put bugs in my office. No. I don’t like it. No. Between allies? No. I’m surprised that people find that noble.”

When it comes to spying on allies, by Snowden’s lights, the news is not always about the target.

“It’s the deception of the government that’s revealed,” Snowden said, noting that the Obama administration offered false public assurances after the initial reports about NSA surveillance in Germany “The U.S. government said: ‘We follow German laws in Germany. We never target German citizens.’ And then the story comes out and it’s: ‘What are you talking about? You’re spying on the chancellor.’ You just lied to the entire country, in front of Congress.”

In private, U.S. intelligence officials still maintain that spying among friends is routine for all concerned, but they are giving greater weight to the risk of getting caught.

“There are many things we do in intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback,” Clapper told a House panel in October.

‘They will make mistakes’

U.S. officials say it is obvious that Snowden’s disclosures will do grave harm to intelligence gathering, exposing methods that adversaries will learn to avoid.

“We’re seeing al-Qaeda and related groups start to look for ways to adjust how they communicate,” said Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a former general counsel at the NSA.

Other officials, who declined to speak on the record about particulars, said they had watched some of their surveillance targets, in effect, changing channels. That evidence can be read another way, they acknowledged, given that the NSA managed to monitor the shift.

Clapper has said repeatedly in public that the leaks did great damage, but in private he has taken a more nuanced stance. A review of early damage assessments in previous espionage cases, he said in one closed-door briefing this fall, found that dire forecasts of harm were seldom borne out.

“People must communicate,” he said, according to one participant who described the confidential meeting on the condition of anonymity. “They will make mistakes, and we will exploit them.”

According to senior intelligence officials, two uncertainties feed their greatest concerns. One is whether Russia or China managed to take the Snowden archive from his computer, a worst-case assumption for which three officials acknowledged there is no evidence.

In a previous assignment, Snowden taught U.S. intelligence personnel how to operate securely in a “high-threat digital environment,” using a training scenario in which China was the designated threat. He declined to discuss the whereabouts of the files, but he said that he is confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong. And he said he did not bring them to Russia.

The other big question is how many documents Snowden took. The NSA’s incoming deputy director, Rick Ledgett, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently that the number may approach 1.7 million, a huge and unexplained spike over previous estimates. Ledgett said he would favor trying to negotiate an amnesty with Snowden in exchange for “assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured.”

“The government knows where to find us if they want to have a productive conversation about resolutions that don’t involve Edward Snowden behind bars,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ben Wizner, the central figure on Snowden’s legal team.

Some news accounts have quoted U.S. government officials as saying Snowden has arranged for the automated release of sensitive documents if he is arrested or harmed. There are strong reasons to doubt that, beginning with Snowden’s insistence, to this reporter and others, that he does not want the documents published in bulk.

If Snowden were fool enough to rig a “dead man’s switch,” confidants said, he would be inviting anyone who wants the documents to kill him.

Asked about such a mechanism in the Moscow interview, Snowden made a face and declined to reply. Later, he sent an encrypted message. “That sounds more like a suicide switch,” he wrote. “It wouldn’t make sense.”

‘It’s not about me’

By temperament and circumstance, Snowden is a reticent man, reluctant to discuss details about his personal life.

Over two days his guard never dropped, but he allowed a few fragments to emerge. He is an “ascetic,” he said. He lives off ramen noodles and chips. He has visitors, and many of them bring books. The books pile up, unread. The Internet is an endless library and a window on the progress of his cause.

“It has always been really difficult to get me to leave the house,” he said. “I just don’t have a lot of needs. . . . Occasionally there’s things to go do, things to go see, people to meet, tasks to accomplish. But it’s really got to be goal-oriented, you know. Otherwise, as long as I can sit down and think and write and talk to somebody, that’s more meaningful to me than going out and looking at landmarks.”

In hope of keeping focus on the NSA, Snowden has ignored attacks on himself.

“Let them say what they want,” he said. “It’s not about me.”

Former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden predicted that Snowden will waste away in Moscow as an alcoholic, like other “defectors.” To this, Snowden shrugged. He does not drink at all. Never has.

But Snowden knows his presence here is easy ammunition for critics. He did not choose refuge in Moscow as a final destination. He said that once the U.S. government voided his passport as he tried to change planes en route to Latin America, he had no other choice.

It would be odd if Russian authorities did not keep an eye on him, but no retinue accompanied Snowden and his visitor saw no one else nearby. Snowden neither tried to communicate furtively nor asked that his visitor do so. He has had continuous Internet access and has talked to his attorneys and to journalists daily, from his first day in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo airport.

“There is no evidence at all for the claim that I have loyalties to Russia or China or any country other than the United States,” he said. “I have no relationship with the Russian government. I have not entered into any agreements with them.”

“If I defected at all,” Snowden said, “I defected from the government to the public.”

203 comments:

This article from The Washington Post is masterful. It lays waste to the arguments by the liars and defenders of the vicious assault by a rogue federal agency, a house of Un-American activities, called the NSA, against the rights and freedoms of American citizens. It is rich in details and easy to understand.

...Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”“The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he said.

...Each year, NSA systems collected hundreds of millions of e-mail address books, hundreds of billions of cellphone location records and trillions of domestic call logs.Most of that data, by definition and intent, belonged to ordinary people suspected of nothing. But vast new storage capacity and processing tools enabled the NSA to use the information to map human relationships on a planetary scale. Only this way, its leadership believed, could the NSA reach beyond its universe of known intelligence targets.

People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his purpose.“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”What entitled Snowden, now 30, to take on that responsibility?“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”“It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual — that I’m uniquely qualified, an angel descending from the heavens — as that they put it on someone, somewhere,” he said. “You have the capability, and you realize every other [person] sitting around the table has the same capability but they don’t do it. So somebody has to be the first.”

1) "Other officials, who declined to speak on the record about particulars, said they had watched some of their surveillance targets, in effect, changing channels. That evidence can be read another way, they acknowledged, given that the NSA managed to monitor the shift."

Exactly! These people are just so consumed with knowing everything, so much so that in their explanations of how security could supposedly be compromised, they reveal that it has not, in fact, been compromised at all.

2) "Former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden predicted that Snowden will waste away in Moscow as an alcoholic, like other “defectors.” To this, Snowden shrugged. He does not drink at all. Never has."

Hayden is a bitter angry fool, and he can’t stand the fact that his beloved NSA got played by this young man.

General Alexander said: "There is no other way to connect the dots." How deeply, sadly ironic.

It is the foreign policy establishment that willfully refuses to connect the dots - between the fateful decision to build bases in Saudi Arabia and 9/11; between the covert support for the Afghani militants in the 70’s and 80's and the radicalization of Afghanistan and Pakistan; between the CIA coup in Iran and the current regime there; between the unblinking support for Israel's campaign of terror against the Palestinians and the formation of radical "Islamic" cells.

Every aspect of the threats the US faces, both from state and non-state actors, is directly traceable to poor, amoral decisions by the NSA, the CIA, and the White House. Terrorists are responsible for their crimes, but the US has been engaged in state terrorism for the last 6 decades.

There is no moral high ground for the US to claim. Obama is just another in a long line of Presidents who drank the kool aid, believing that the United States could control events through coercion and high tech weaponry. It has been a failure since Korea, and the cost in lives and economic health and international relationships has been staggeringly high.

Look at the ME and north Africa: If Israel could shed its morality, it could follow the lead of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Turkey, all of whom are practicing terrorism as this is written. Fortunately for the Palestinians, Israel does not practice wholesale murder and ethnic cleansing.

The same cannot be said of the Palestinians, who launched a bloody intifada on the pretext of Sharon's visit to the holiest spot known to Judaism. Israel could have unleashed her entire might and concluded its Palestinian problem in a week. Israel did not, but al-Assad did. How can you seriously make such a ridiculous comparison? Irrational hatred.

Given the general chaos in the region, Israel could act with impunity in handling the Palestinian problem. Despite no one standing in the way, Israel has stayed out of the fray, other than taking out high value targets in Syria of several occasions. Israel has not used the mayhem to settle its problem once for all.

"On Dec. 16, in a lawsuit that could not have gone forward without the disclosures made possible by Snowden, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon described the NSA’s capabilities as “almost Orwellian” and said its bulk collection of U.S. domestic telephone records was probably unconstitutional."

The two best ways to put an end to this.......the courts or the Congress. President Bumby knew all about it, but he has only appointed that panel. Presumably he could order it ended. But he didn't/hasn't.

*******

Jenny was making some sense, then she overboard with this:

"Every aspect of the threats the US faces, both from state and non-state actors, is directly traceable to poor, amoral decisions by the NSA, the CIA, and the White House. Terrorists are responsible for their crimes, but the US has been engaged in state terrorism for the last 6 decades."

*****

Snowden to me is a hero. He took, and is taking, a great risk. He has done the people of his country a great service.

Kent George Nagano (born November 22, 1951) is an American conductor and opera administrator. He is currently the music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and the Bavarian State Opera.

Nagano was born in Berkeley, California, while his parents were in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Sansei, which means that he is a third generation Japanese-American.[1]He grew up in Morro Bay, a city located on the Central Coast of California in San Luis Obispo County. He studied sociology and music at the University of California, Santa Cruz[citation needed]. After graduation he moved to San Francisco State University to study music. While there, he took composition courses from Grosvenor Cooper and Roger Nixon. He also studied at the École Normale de Musique de Paris.

---

In 1982, Nagano conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in several of Frank Zappa's completely orchestral compositions for the first time. Nagano recorded several of Zappa's pieces on the issue London Symphony Orchestra, Vol. 1, where Zappa had personally chosen Nagano to conduct the orchestra. Nagano described this as "my first chance, my first real break".

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We knew his folks.

When their parents were sent off to the camps in WWII, some Anglo neighbor cared for their farm outside of Morro Bay.

...never went into an extended spiel about the atrocities of the camps, as does George Hosato Takei.

"Led by Google and then Yahoo, one company after another announced expensive plans to encrypt its data traffic over tens of thousands of miles of cable. It was a direct — in some cases, explicit — blow to NSA collection of user data in bulk. If the NSA wanted the information, it would have to request it or circumvent the encryption one target at a time."

The bastards should have been doing it all along, as anyone that needs to know shit about security knows.

"“Perhaps I am naive,” he replied, “but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.” The steady expansion of surveillance powers, he wrote, is “such a direct threat to democratic governance that I have risked my life and family for it.”

Perhaps anyone that thinks that Washington DC, as presently constituted, given the SIZE AND SCOPE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, and all the hundreds of thousands of paid hangers-on, is the greatest threat to the citizens and future of the country is hopelessly naive.

But only true Genius can see that Bigger Government, and total control of private records will lead to Nirvana.

The average length of a stay in hospice care also jumped substantially over that time, in California and nationally, according to the analysis. Profit per patient quintupled, to $1,975, California records show.

This vast growth took place as the hospice “movement,” once led by religious and community organizations, was evolving into a $17 billion industry dominated by for-profit companies. Much of that is paid for by the U.S. government — roughly $15 billion of industry revenue came from Medicare last year.

At AseraCare, for example, one of the nation’s largest for-profit chains, hospice patients kept on living. About 78 percent of patients who enrolled at the Mobile, Ala., branch left the hospice’s care alive, according to company figures. As many as 59 percent of patients left the AseraCare branch in nearby Foley, Ala., alive. And at the one in Monroeville, 48 percent were discharged from the hospice alive.

“It was definitely good news,” said Bessie Blount, whose father received hospice care from the Monroeville outfit and left after about a year, she said.

About three years later, her father, Chocolate Blount, 91, is still alive.

"At AseraCare, for example, one of the nation’s largest for-profit chains, hospice patients kept on living. About 78 percent of patients who enrolled at the Mobile, Ala., branch left the hospice’s care alive, according to company figures. As many as 59 percent of patients left the AseraCare branch in nearby Foley, Ala., alive. And at the one in Monroeville, 48 percent were discharged from the hospice alive."

This is unacceptable. This is horrendous. We absolutely cannot have this.

A hospice is where you go to die, dammit.

A perfect hospice is where no one gets out alive !

Goddamned capitalists !!

Thank God we have ObamaCare and the Death Panels to put an end to this non-sense !!!

bob - for a female to use a strap-on dildo to perform anal sex on a male. The term 'bob' was a runner-up in a competition by readers of Dan Savage's Savage Love column to coin a term for this type of behavior.

The American Studies Association's endorsement this month of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions continues to stir passions, with four colleges and universities announcing their withdrawal from the association, a second leading higher-education association denouncing the boycott and a rising tide of college presidents speaking out against it. One after the other, prominent university presidents and academic leaders have issued condemnations over the last week that emphasize the importance of academic freedom.

The executive committee of the American Association of Universities, an organization of the most prestigious research institutions, joined the American Association of University Professors in opposing the boycott. Lawrence H. Summers, a former president of Harvard, suggested an informal counterboycott in which university administrators would refuse to pay for professors to go to ASA meetings. (New York Times)

"Whoever wishes to be a Christian, let him pluck out the eyes of his reason...We must give reason a vacation and enter a different school. We must refrain from consulting reason. We must bid reason hold its peace; we must order it to be dead. We must gouge out its eyes and pluck its feathers...You must kill the other thoughts and the ways of reason or of the flesh, for God detests them."

"Statement by Jewish Activists and Organizations active in BDS against IsraelA Jewish response to the Statement of Jewish Zionist Organizations on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)

Because academic, cultural and commercial boycotts, divestments and sanctions of Israel:

• are being called for by Palestinian civil society in response to the occupation and colonisation of their land,

• are a moral tool of non-violent, peaceful response to more than sixty years of Israeli colonialism,

• and, rightfully place accountability on Israeli institutions (and their allies and partners) that use business, cultural, and academic ties to white-wash Israel’s responsibility for continuing crimes against humanity,

The undersigned organisations and individuals stand firm in our support of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) initiatives against Israel until it meets its obligation to recognise the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law.

BDS is not anti-Semitic

We reject the notion that the 2005 BDS call from Palestine, and the BDS campaigns the world over which it has inspired, are rooted in anti-Jewish sentiment.

On the contrary, BDS is an anti-racist movement against the daily, brutal occupation of Palestine and military threat to the region by the state of Israel.

False claims of anti-Semitism distort the true nature of the Palestinian struggle and are an affront to, and betrayal of, the long history of Jewish survival and resistance to persecution.

BDS is not anti-democratic

We also reject the assertion that the cultural and academic boycotts of Israel defy the democratic principle of free speech.

Research and development in academic institutions play a central role in designing and defending Israel’s military and intelligence machinery.

Cultural institutions perpetuate the deception of Israeli democracy. To defend freedom of speech for those who disregard justice while demonising those who struggle for justice is a great disservice to genuine democracy.

Through boycott, divestment and sanctions, civil society asserts our commitment to not contribute to the Israeli state, which is responsible for atrocious acts of disregard for human life and well being.

Attacks against BDS campaigns will not prevent us from taking this stance against Israeli impunity.

For the Jewish organisations signed onto this letter, self-determination for Jews includes the right to participate in the movement for justice in Palestine and to live in the world with our fellow citizens in peace, freedom, and equity.

It does not include the domination and colonisation of other people or living separate from our fellow human beings in a state that privileges Jews.

BDS was a key strategy in ending the white South African system of apartheid by applying international pressure.

As Los Zetas and Anonymous indicate, cyberwar among non-state groups has the potential to rapidly cross the line, leading to more internal violence and greater erosion of the state’s authority and legitimacy.

The clash between Anonymous and Los Zetas demonstrates that cyberspace is the ultimate ungoverned territory.

Government jurisdictions are weak while criminal groups have near free reign when it comes to the use and abuse of the online world. In countries like Mexico with its weak institutions, sophisticated organized criminal groups, and high levels of internal violence, the line between public safety and national security is already a fine one.

To combat these threats, more attention should be devoted to analyzing how these groups may evolve in their understanding of the coercive use of cyberspace to further their interests. For example, such groups may move to coerce individual members of the state like decision makers, politicians, military members, and law enforcement personnel by threatening to “dox” them by releasing their personal information online or electronically drain their financial holdings.

This sort of “Wikiwar” of intimidation, in certain situations, could significantly impair a government’s capability to act.

Additionally, Anonymous’ operation against Los Zetas also shows the potential for the “crowd-sourcing of conflict” in the digital domain. The next outbreak of a cyberwar may begin with an online announcement of the targeting of another non-state group, the reasons it should be attacked, and a call for anyone to feed information about the group’s membership and activities to the collective.

Anonymous may then choose to use the information in a coercive manner that is consistent with its ethos. Or, it may merely organize an online poll so that individuals can vote for who should be targeted by the group.

This is a unique feature of Anonymous as a non-state group.

“Anonymous is a classic ‘do-ocracy’ . . .. As the term implies, that means rule by sheer doing: Individuals propose actions, others join in (or not), and the Anonymous flag is flown over the result. There’s no one to grant permission, no promise of praise or credit, so every action must be its own reward.”

*Paul Rexton Kan is an Associate Professor of National Security Studies and the Henry L. Stimson Chair of Military Studies at the U.S. Army War College. He is the author of Drugs and Contemporary Warfare and the recent book, Cartels at War: Mexico’s Drug-Fueled Violence and the Challenge to US National Security.

"... there is nothing wrong with making a good living catering to the base, voyeuristic demand created by many millions of Americans, as do the Ducksters. But are capitalists compelled to like their product because it makes money? No. It is perfectly productive, if far from lucrative, for me to criticize all aspects of the puerile Duck production.

The Ducksters are part of a debased culture—the right-wing answer to Kim Kardashian, whose deformed figure and ass elephantiasis you can ogle online and on late-night Leno (1.21 minutes in).

Then there is the matter of Duck-Dynasty religiosity. "I think you’re missing an important point, Ilana," said one perceptive Facebook Friend. "The were selected for the show because they are how you describe them. Duck Dynasty was meant to be a redneck minstrel show. They were supposed to be objects of ridicule for cosmopolitan America. They are what blue-state America imagines religiosity to be."

Arguably, this is precisely what being devout looks like in the U.S.A.

Delve more deeply, and you'll discover that Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters professes. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture. As for the Ducksters' occupation. I'll leave you with Proverbs 12:10:

Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel. ..."

Iliana Mercer, libertarian, author, blogger....

"A man who His ox doth moveTo wrathWill never be By woman loved"

William Blake

(alas he is not speaking of our fallen world, where all to many women love violent men)

(CNN) -- Mohamad Chatah, a former Lebanese finance minister and ambassador to the United States, died Friday when a car bomb struck his convoy in downtown Beirut, Lebanon's National News Agency reported.

The Dow Jones industrial average, which is looking for its seventh-straight day of gains and its 51st record close of the year, opened slightly higher Friday, as Wall Street looks to extend the so-called "Santa Claus rally.

Laissez les bons temps rouler !

Give US some more of that 'Old Time Socialism!Crony Capitalism or Fascism - a rose by any other name will smell as sweet!

Mr. Snowden is a problem, even if his motives are totally honorable: what about the next Snowden? The next Snowden may be motivated by greed, anger, ideology or insanity. Capturing Mr. Snowden will not undo the damage done, nor will it prevent future acts. Punishing Mr. Snowden will not put Humpty together again or be a foolproof deterrent.

To prevent another such debacle, the system at the NSA must be thoroughly changed, making it as secure as humanly possible. But who is going to oversee this systemic change? And once the system is secure, what is to prevent the NSA et al from doing what they have been doing? The so-called judicial system failed miserably, acting as the rubber stamp of legitimacy. Congressional members (bipartisan) serving an oversight function were utter failures. So, who do find to guard the henhouse?

I do not disagree with Jenny's assessment of six decades of national disrepute. I would go further, arguing that progressives began this march to totalitarianism in the second decade of the 20th C. Finding the control of humans and vast resources irresistible, the conservatives joined in, paying lip-service to reform each election cycle.

How do we solve the problem of Mr. Snowden and the gross abuses he has uncovered for all to see?

Could evidence gathered by the NSA be shared with, say, the FBI to create the probable cause to investigate Americans who allegedly support terror organizations? Would such sharing so taint evidence gathered solely by the FBI as to make it inadmissible?

Realpolitik ...The NSA informs the DEA of a vehicle, loaded with drugs, moving through an area. The DEA works with local law enforcement and has the vehicle pulled over for a traffic violation. The 'suspicious' driver is interrogated, roadside, and the vehicle eventually searched.

The illegal wiretap is ignored, in the police reports, and the 'bust' is both 'Justified' and 'Righteous'!

(RNN) - The National Security Agency is obtaining information via wiretaps and electronic surveillance about common crimes involving Americans, which it then feeds to the Drug Enforcement Agency and local law enforcement to make arrests.

The Department of Justice, which controls the DEA, has said it is investigating the drug agency's links to the NSA. The use of mass surveillance in drug crimes could help explain why the DEA doubled the value of assets seized since 2001.

According to a report by Reuters released Monday, information obtained by the NSA is fed to a little-known unit of the DEA, called the Special Operations Division. This unit is partnered with several other government agencies as well, including the FBI, CIA, IRS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and Department of Homeland Security.

Troll, troll go awayFind another place to playPecking away while in the nudeWriting nothing that isn't rudeNow, take your meds and go to bedBefore another word is saidTroll, troll go awayFind another place to play

U.S. Tells Suspect for First Time It Used NSA Surveillance Program in Criminal Case

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ByDevlin BarrettconnectUpdated Oct. 25, 2013 10:26 p.m. ET

For the first time, the U.S. government notified a terror suspect that one of the National Security Agency's far-reaching surveillance programs was used to build a criminal case against him, setting the stage for a constitutional challenge.

The notification was filed to the lawyer of Jamshid Muhtorov, who is charged in Colorado with providing material support to a designated terrorist organization, specifically the Islamic Jihad Union. Authorities say he sought to travel to Syria to join a group of fighters there.

The notification to Mr. Muhtorov's lawyer marks the first time the government has acknowledged a criminal case against a terror defendant was derived at least in part from communications gathered by the NSA. Based on court documents, it appears in Mr. Muhtorov's case the government monitored his emails and Internet usage, though they also tracked his telephone.

Simply by notifying Mr. Muhtorov's lawyer about the use of the much-debated NSA eavesdropping program, the government has set the stage for a significant legal fight that could head to the Supreme Court. There have been many previous challenges to the NSA's programs, but so far none have been able to overcome the legal issue of standing: proving that the person or persons suing the government was actually subject to the secret surveillance. Now, the government is acknowledging for the first time that someone's communications were caught in that surveillance, and they were charged criminally as a result.

Oh, and I am going to give you to 13:00 EST to provide the link. Since a man of integrity would not post something he could not prove instantly, I am not obliged to give you the time. But you are not a man of integrity, so I will play the "go fish" game with you. Put up or admit your error.

The exchange between Jenny and I was quite specific as to the NSA and Israel contracts.

Your reply, "That is the amount the US has given in aid to Israel, since 1977." was another Jew hating, Jew bating lie. I knew what you had done, you miserable cheat. I just wanted you to validate my thought. You really are a moron. Only one of your fantasy prepubescent Jewish fantasy girls would fail to see through to the huckster. You are human waste.

As I understand it, the wrath of Chancellor Merkel is animated mostly by the damage done between German-US joint operations. If Germany cannot freely share intelligence with the US without fear of detection, why should it share? The Snowden revelations have done far more damage to the perception of US competence among allies than can be a known-known. Fixing this level of distrust is going to be long term process. Sometimes our actionable horizon is short term. Put as succinctly as possible, the US cannot be trusted. Period.

I'm my own person now. I can make my own mind up. I can make choices. I'm 22 years old. I'm the boss of me.

If I have a choice between watching 'The Young and The Restless' or reading more of this garbage sewage that spews from bobratwhacky or what ever his stupid name is, the guy that is insane, I'm going with 'The Young and The Restless'.

Least there's something new happening on there each day. This whackybobrat insane jerk is just a broken record.

Plies terms the act "Becky" because of the widely held notion and/or stereotype that Caucasian women are somewhat more sexually liberal in terms of frequency of encounters, random partnering, and overall lasciviousness.

With "Becky" being a popular name given to females at birth in the White society, one can assume that Plies simply chose this name because of its unique association to "Whiteness",particularly where the female is concerned.

“Eleanor looked up, surprised; the little girl was sliding back in her chair, sullenly refusing her milk, while her father frowned and her brother giggled and her mother said calmly, 'She wants her parve chocolate.'

It had been reported late last month that Toronto’s bombastic mayor Rob Fudd, who has been under scrutiny of late after admitting he used drugs, wanted to attend Wednesday’s Winter Classic between the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs.

Well, turns out he can’t make his way to Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. Fudd instead will hold the New Year’s Levee on Jan. 1 in Toronto’s city hall, according to the Toronto Star.

“The levee offers residents a chance to shake the mayor’s hand. The deputy mayor and city councillors usually join him,” the Star’s Daniel Dale reports.

Fudd had said he planned on buying his own ticket and paying for his own travel expenses to the game. However, the Star reports that the U.S. government said Fudd could have been

“turned back at the border because of his admission to crack cocaine use.”

The exchange between Jenny and I was quite specific as to the NSA and Israel contracts.

Your reply, "That is the amount the US has given in aid to Israel, since 1977." was another Jew hating, Jew bating lie. I knew what you had done, you miserable cheat. I just wanted you to validate my thought. You really are a moron. Only one of your fantasy prepubescent Jewish fantasy girls would fail to see through to the huckster. You are human waste.

For 2,000 years, pilgrims and archaeologists have hunted for physical evidence of Jesus and his family, without success.

But now an ancient burial box claiming to contain the earliest reference to the Christian saviour is about to go on public display in Israel after its owner was cleared of forgery. It has not been seen in public since a single, brief exhibition in Toronto in 2002.

The modest limestone burial box, known as an ossuary, is typical of first-century Jerusalem, and is owned by Oded Golan, an Israeli antiquities collector. Chiselled on the side are the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

James the Just was the first leader of the Christians in Jerusalem after the Crucifixion. He was executed for apostasy by the local rabbinical court.

At that time, Jews were not buried but laid in a cave. The bones were collected after a year and placed in an ossuary. Thousands have been discovered, some of them inscribed with names to identify whose bones they contain. One other ossuary mentions a brother.

"This is the oldest evidence that mentions the name of Jesus Christ," said Golan, who bought the box in the 1970s but did not realise its significance until Sorbonne professor Andre Lemaire noticed it in Golan's collection. Lemaire published his findings in 2002 and the ossuary was briefly displayed at a Toronto museum, causing a worldwide sensation.

But sceptics questioned its authenticity. In 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority seized the ossuary and appointed an expert committee who dubbed it a fake. Golan was arrested and charged with forging the mention of Jesus.

After a 10-year investigation and criminal trial, Golan was found innocent of forgery in 2012. Despite the verdict, doubts remain.

"Because of the differences in the depth and the clarity and the kerning [spacing] between the first half of the inscription that mentions James son of Joseph, and the second half, I'd be willing to wager that the second half was added in modern times," said Prof Christopher Rollston of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.

But other experts disagree.

"The inscription is written in the Jewish script, it was done with a sharp instrument and I think it was done by the same hand. It is an authentic inscription," Prof Gabriel Barkay of Bar-Ilan University explained.

Golan cites expert evidence from the trial showing the patina - a biological crust formed on ancient objects - inside the grooves of the inscription.

"There is no doubt that it's ancient, and the probability is that it belonged to the brother of Jesus Christ," said Golan.

Although Golan's trial ended last year, the ossuary was returned only a few weeks ago by the Israel authorities.

Golan plans to put it on public display, together with the expert opinions from the trial, so that scholars and the public can decide for themselves whether this box did truly contain the bones of the brother of Christ – a unique piece of concrete evidence of the family of Jesus

Farmer BobFri Dec 27, 06:05:00 PM ESTHe was executed for apostasy by the local rabbinical court.

Sorry, Bob, this is simply not true. First, there was no rabbinic system until well after the destruction of the Temple. There would be no statutory rabbinic court system until one was recognized by the Muslims of Baghdad.

Even the Sanhedrin could not order capital punishment. The Romans were very particular about monopolizing violence.

That makes sense to me. It was not my opinion. It was the opinion of the writer. The little I know of that early time tells me there would not have been a rabbinic system while the system of the Temple prevailed.

The exchange between Jenny and I was quite specific as to the NSA and Israel contracts.

Your reply, "That is the amount the US has given in aid to Israel, since 1977." was another Jew hating, Jew bating lie. I knew what you had done, you miserable cheat. I just wanted you to validate my thought. You really are a moron. Only one of your fantasy prepubescent Jewish fantasy girls would fail to see through to the huckster. You are human waste.

The most passionate advocate has been Prince Charles — an often underestimated, consistently thoughtful figure. “For 20 years,” he said in a recent speech, “I have tried to build bridges between Islam and Christianity and to dispel ignorance and misunderstanding. The point though, surely, is that we have now reached a crisis where the bridges are rapidly being deliberately destroyed by those with a vested interest in doing so.”

With all due respect to the Prince et al, Islam has exploited Christians and Jews. Neither Christians nor Jews could bring suit against a Muslim nor could they defend themselves when attacked e.g. Nothing has changed other than high capacity magazines, making the killing more efficient.

Desert Rat has still not come up with proof of the $110 billion USD he claims NSA paid Israel.

He is a cheat, liar, coward, and racist. The list will grow with time.

While not in favor of banning or censorship of a legitimate opinion, I would support taking down for a 24 hour period anything that desert rat scribbles after being caught in a lie. A lie would include any post claiming numbers and facts without links. He wastes the time of others and assassinates the character of the innocent.

The exchange between Jenny and I was quite specific as to the NSA and Israel contracts.

Your reply, "That is the amount the US has given in aid to Israel, since 1977." was another Jew hating, Jew bating lie. I knew what you had done, you miserable cheat. I just wanted you to validate my thought. You really are a moron. Only one of your fantasy prepubescent Jewish fantasy girls would fail to see through to the huckster. You are human waste.

Somebody threatened to blow the whistle. This has been going on for years. Women Marines will be going into combat units in 2016. It looks like some Marines are so unenlightened that they think people on the line should be able to pull their own weight.

Unlike their female counterparts, male Marines have long been required to do at least 3 pullups as part of the Physical Fitness Test (PFT). That's the minimum requirement for males.

Currently, “women aren’t able to make the minimum standard of three pull-ups,” Marine spokesman Capt. Eric Flanagan told CNSNews.com. Fifty-five percent of female recruits tested at the end of boot camp were unable to do three pull-ups (1 percent of male recruits also failed).

Pull-ups have been used to test Marines’ upper body strength for over 40 years. The ability to pull-up one’s own body weight over a bar shows the upper body strength that, in combat, is needed to lift fallen comrades, pull one’s self over a wall, and carry heavy munitions. Combat Marines also carry a pack that weighs around 90 pounds, with gunners carrying an additional 50 or 60 pounds.

The Marines’s “Corps Report” anchor, Lance Cpl. Ally Beiswanger, explained that the deadline has been extended to allow for “further gathering of data to ensure that all female Marines are given the best opportunity to succeed.” (I'm guessing no ranking NCO or officer could be found willing to make a statement that dumb)

Palestinians and Israelis have met more than 20 times since July 2013 with little progress. Israel security issues dwarfed the final status negotiators while the Jews-only state continued to build, at an accelerated rate, Jewish colonies, undermining the very peace talks.

Fearing the collapse of the talks, US Secretary of State John Kerry amassed earlier this month a team of 160 American diplomats and security specialists, led by General John Allen, a former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, to draft a framework “that could help both Israelis and Palestinians get to an agreement”.

To be sure, President Barak Obama and Secretary Kerry are much more serious in pushing a peace agreement than any previous US administration. Nevertheless, they have proven equally powerless in overcoming Israel’s mercurial demands.

Today, Israel is requesting to prequalify previous Palestinian recognition of it, not just as a nation of people, but as an ethnocentric “Jewish state”. It is also demanding that any future peace agreement must codify its occupation of parts of the West Bank –the Jordan River valley – under a euphemism called “security arrangements”.

In the meantime, the American administration which promised that the current talks would focus on reaching a final status peace deal by April 2014 is already back-pedalling.

The US mediating team, led by Martin Indyk, an ex-member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has already championed Israel’s position, urging Palestinians to forgo a final settlement and settle instead for a “framework” interim agreement.

In a speech at the Zionist Saban Centre for Middle East Policy earlier in December, President Obama said the objective of the negotiations is to reach a “framework that would not address every single detail”. Referring to Palestinians, he added: “they don’t get everything that they want on day one”.

The US mediating team, led by Martin Indyk, an ex-member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has already championed Israel’s position, urging Palestinians to forgo a final settlement and settle instead for a “framework” interim agreement.

Information from Kerry’s mid-December meeting with the chairman of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, revealed that the US was on the verge of proposing an outline for an interim peace plan addressing “everything [Israel] wants” while pushing aside Palestinian sovereignty, the status of Jerusalem and the refugee question.

Fearing a repeat of the Camp David meeting in 2000 – when then US President Bill Clinton adopted the Israeli position – Abbas briefed a special meeting of Arab foreign ministers on the impending American peace plan. Abbas informed the gathering of the Palestinian refusal to enter into another interim understanding, a new racialist recognition of Israel or any proposal favouring extended an Israeli presence in any part of the West Bank or at the border with Jordan.

he Israeli army radio claimed the US plan would include provisions for an extended Israeli military presence in the Jordan River valley. Other reports, however, have pointed out that the postponement of Kerry’s trip – initially planned for the last week of December─ was to address strong Palestinian opposition, which see American, not Israeli, troops being deployed along the border with Jordan.

More than twenty years since the original Oslo interim accord, and 14 years since the failure of Camp David, the illegal Jewish settlers have more than doubled in the occupied West Bank.

Interim Peace II is likely to quadruple the Jewish colonies and change the Palestinian Authority’s role from a coordinator to endorser of the Israeli occupation.

Miss T, you put up a good quote from the confused Dr. Luther the other day, which I am too lazy to go back and find.

In it Martin took aim at reason. He was not wholly wrong however.

He's right in the sense that reason can't really tell you just why, for instance, the moon is really 'there', though it can tell you how to get there.

To give up reason, and hurry hurry to the comforts of 'faith' is a fool's journey. One can have 'faith' in too many o so mistaken things.

Human experience is a better guide, as long as it is authentic experience and is judged, reasonably enough, by its 'fruits for life', as William James first pointed out in our literature.

All authentic human experience ends in 'fruits for life'.

'Faith' often ends in such non-sense as "we love death more than you love life" and such stuff, some type of which stuff Luther spouted in the second have of his complex and often totally wrong headed life.

...still waiting for you to prove your written claim: NSA gave contracts to Israel worth $110 billion USD since 1977... Come on, Big Guy, just admit you pulled the number out of the air. We already know you are a liar.

He also, as you mention, took out after the peasants, who had taken his advice, and read the Bible for themselves, and made up their own minds, and began to wonder why are we living in huts and doing all the work, and they are living in castles, and doing nothing.

Luther also took out after the Moslems. And of course the Catholics.

Basically, in the end, he took out after everybody but himself and his protective Prince.

I am not fanaticizing about young lovers. What I said was I have often thought the moon is there for the benefit of young lovers, you know, young men and women and such. You are always the one talking about 11 year olds.

I am thinking at least teens and above, you know, even Romeo and Juliet were quite young by our standards, but they seem to have been thought to be in their teens.

Scrolling through a list of recent lobbying disclosures in early September, an advocacy group for the castrated stuck out, so to speak, among the trade associations and corporate multinationals.

The Eunuchs Society was one of Achillean’s six clients, according to lobbying databases. And Achillean’s chief lobbyist, chairman, and CEO was Douglas Brice Jordan. Who, upon further review, turned out to have spent much of life behind bars.

I watched Achillean’s “video of corporate executives and other matters,” which features Jordan prominently. In the video, he gazes out a window as Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston sing “When You Believe” in the background.

Michael Meador is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison for his role in a murder, a sentence that overlapped with Jordan’s. He is also the CEO of M.D. Meador Enterprises, which lists Jordan as its registered agent.

Jordan would later claim he had no idea that at least 10 of the companies he helped incorporate were run by convicted criminals, including rapists, murderers, and drug traffickers.

olice searched his car and found two black bags containing “numerous credit cards from several different banks, manufactured traveler’s checks drawn on Swiss Centurion Financial Services Inc., and … boxed check stock for the printing of checks.”

The arresting officer noted that Jordan “offered to return the application monies to the victims but said he did not have the cash available at the time.” Wilson and Bass say they haven’t seen a dime but add that the $100 they each lost represented the least of their damages.

“Fuck the money,” exclaimed Wilson. “I lost my house. I lost my car.”

The trial of super-lobbyist Douglas Brice Jordan will begin on December 18

Lawrence Davidson argues that Israel is increasingly seen as illegitimate because of its own behaviour and that it can either ditch the occupation, Zionism, racism and inequality or become a pariah state.

In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.

But remember: these people are not the enemy. "Last year, during my visit to Washington, in a very important briefing a day before I met U.S. President [Barack Obama], his national security adviser Tom Donilon, and senior White House officials, generals, and intelligence officials, the national security adviser met with me. He told me: 'The Taliban are not our enemies and we don't want to fight them.'" -- Hamid Karzai, November 26, 2013

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.